It has driven me & iron_chef a bit loony. ;) He did come up with a hackaround for it, which is cool.

Solving that bug would help 70001, 80k alpha i386/x86_64 too...

Reading the fedora 8 bugzilla, it sounds like their is a similar problem that happens if Anaconda writes the partition table immediately because it's low on memory. Don't know if the behavior applies here.

It has driven me & iron_chef a bit loony. ;) He did come up with a hackaround for it, which is cool.

Solving that bug would help 70001, 80k alpha i386/x86_64 too...

Reading the fedora 8 bugzilla, it sounds like their is a similar problem that happens if Anaconda writes the partition table immediately because it's low on memory. Don't know if the behavior applies here.

Yep, no error is indicated at all. It just hangs forever. But only on 2.6.23 kernels.

Weirdness.. Unfortunately I don't know enough to really help, but using my troubleshooting skills, this is what I came up with to try and maybe spark an idea for you guys:

What changes are made to the 2.6.23 kernel that when it's installed it changes the disk image that could screw up anaconda? Does it put things in different places or do funky link things? Maybe you need to have a different program setting up the partitions or formatting the disk image.

Also what are the differences between the BLAG anaconda and the Fedora one? Does BLAG use the latest Anaconda? Maybe something has been updated ot tweaked that is affecting it, or how about all the under pinnings of Anaconda like Python, could an some outdated part be responsible? Is it possible to run the textmode install with verbose python execution (python -m trace -t) ?

Also what are the differences between the BLAG anaconda and the Fedora one?

Patches, including stuff about selinux to disable it. That causes problems sometimes. ;)

noldrin wrote:

Does BLAG use the latest Anaconda?

Same version that shipped with the equivalent fedora version. I have build svn versions as well. Sometimes we add fixes that were added as updates.img's as patches. The big difference is that yum changes and lots of times it's changes break things in anaconda. For this reason, i get irritated with yum and am not as responsive about fixing it in the repo. ;)

noldrin wrote:

Maybe something has been updated ot tweaked that is affecting it, or how about all the under pinnings of Anaconda like Python, could an some outdated part be responsible?

Certainly, or a missing bit. I think it's tied into the fact that it can't copy those ISO images either.

noldrin wrote:

Is it possible to run the textmode install with verbose python execution (python -m trace -t) ?

The 'shutil.copyfile()' call is executing, but it goes off into the weeds and never finishes. The win.pop() line is what makes the pop-up message window disappear, which never happens. shutil.copyfile() is copying the file stage2.img from the mounted CD (at /mnt/source) to the newly formatted root partition (mounted at /mnt/sysimage) as rhinstall-stage2.img. stage2.img is a squashfs'ed filesystem that is also loop-mounted at /mnt/runtime, and that's where anaconda is running from. Anaconda actually finishes the file copy (if you get to a shell and look at /mnt/sysimage/rhinstall-stage2.img, you can even see that it's the same size as stage2.img. But it just never finishes. Running ps -ax from a shell shows that the anaconda processes is in the "D" state, or uninterruptable sleep, which should never ever happen unless the kernel screws something up.

Quote:

I should also note, running this command is failing too (!):

Code:

mount foo.iso /mnt/foocp -a /mnt/foo /tmp/bar

When copying over some images. Hmm.... zisofs?

I hadn't considered zisofs... that's entirely possible. We should try an uncompressed ISO, definitely.

noldrin wrote:

Also what are the differences between the BLAG anaconda and the Fedora one?

Yeah, it's 90% cosmetic, and about 10% disabling selinux.

noldrin wrote:

Does BLAG use the latest Anaconda?

One problem is that anaconda is an EXTREMELY volatile moving target. Finding a version of anaconda, yum, rpm, and various other python utils that actually work together is a huge pain in the ass. I think I've even read on the anaconda-devel list, straight from a developer, that Fedora/Red Hat doesn't even necessarily use the version of anaconda that they ship with a distro to actually build that distro.

jebba wrote:

noldrin wrote:

Is it possible to run the textmode install with verbose python execution (python -m trace -t) ?

iron_chef? You ever run it that way?

No, I haven't, actually. That's a good idea, though. Anaconda is actually really verbose with it's debugging output to begin with though, it provides somewhat useful logs. What would be interesting is to build it so that something like strace is packed into stage2.img so that we could drop to a shell and see what sort of kernel/system calls it's doing. I was about to hook gdb up to it yesterday, but then I got busy with "real life" and didn't get a chance too. It would be really good to see what part of the kernel it's getting hung up on.

What sucks is that it could be so many different things, or combinations of those things (ext3/scheduling/disk io/squashfs/lvm/selinux/etc.). I'm 99% certain that it's something lower level than python/anaconda, especially since we can reproduce the same sort of hang just copying stuff from a loop mounted ISO image like jebba mentioned. What also sucks is that the 2.6.23 kernel incorporated a ridiculously huge set of changes, so it's really tricky to figure out what might be causing it. Wasn't there even a brand new "controversial" scheduler that made it's debut in 2.6.23? That's extremely suspicious to me, especially since a permanently sleeping process is likely a kernel scheduling problem. Either that, or it's hung up on disk i/o (the CD-ROM).

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